Category: Game Reviews

Addictive. Which surprises me, since I spend most of my time failing at individual missions, struggling desperately to keep my adventurers from succumbing to madness. And yet I keep coming back for more.

Three things I learned about game design:

Art and sound design go a long way to selling the game. The mechanics of the thing can be familiar, while the art and the sound (that narrator!) really immerse the player in the world.

Failure can be fun, so long as the player can anticipate it, and recover from it. With those two pieces, failing becomes a continuation of the play experience, not a detriment.

Don’t be dismissive of old game forms. Even the venerable dungeon crawl has some life left in it, yet.

We spent our time rushing around the board, from crisis to crisis, trying to stay one step ahead of the many enemies around us. In the end, we won, but barely. Victory felt more like a staving off of defeat than outright success.

Three things I learned about game design:

For a complex cooperative game, leave out betrayal. It’ll increase the difficulty without increasing any enjoyment.

Tying your character classes to individuals (real, fictional, or mythological) is a great hook into the game world.

Having enemies refresh after defeat is a good way to generate a siege mentality in your players, but it makes the game as a whole feel darker. Use it sparingly.

Took longer to explain the rules than to play the game. Not that the rules are complex, just that the game itself is so quick.

Had a good time, but it always seemed like the werewolves had the hardest job. They have the most reason to talk during the day, if only to throw suspicion on someone else. In the games we played, whoever spoke first was probably a werewolf.

Three things I learned about game design:

If you build discussion and argument into the game, set a time limit. Otherwise things can get bogged down, and drag on long enough to not be fun anymore.

It is basically impossible for players to properly execute a team-based strategy if they don’t know what team they’re on.

If you design gameplay that rewards players for screwing over their teammates, they need to be able to win on their own.

I made the mistake of playing it like a deck-building card game, only picking up mines that had victory points on them. These were few and far between, though, so I ended up with a lot fewer gems to use to purchase the more lucrative mines that opened up later on.

Three things I learned about game design:

Don’t rely on just color to distinguish sides or types in the game. I’m color blind, and had a hard time telling two of the gems apart, because their colors were so similar.

Even a rather simple mechanic — gems buy mines, which give gems to buy more mines — can yield an interesting game, once randomness and competition enter into it.

Introducing an unbalancing element can be ok, if it pushes the game towards a conclusion